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Separately, IDC projects the SD-WAN market to exceed $8 billion
in 2021, “that estimate includes SD-WAN hardware, software and
managed SD-WAN services, a small, but growing, portion of the
total managed WAN services market,” said Michael O’Brien
(pictured above, left), vice president of worldwide
channel sales at Silver Peak. “That does not include leased
lines, subscription lines, MPLS lines and even the services that
go around deploying those circuits. So, SD-WAN has the potential
to disrupt the total managed WAN services market which is more
than $100 billion.”

The global managed WAN services market has for years been in
complete ownership of telcos and it has not been accessible to
the general channels. But SD-WAN is rapidly opening up the
market.

“That’s what our partners are really excited about,” O’Brien
said. “For the first time, there is a technology that allows
partners to disrupt a market that they couldn’t really
participate before.”

“The other trend is that services and managed SD-WAN services are
leading the way. Frost & Sullivan conducted a global survey
on how customers see themselves acquiring and deploying SD-WAN
and while early adopters have embraced a Do It Yourself (DIY)
deployment model, longer term, 80 percent of respondents plan to
do so through a managed SD-WAN service. So, it’s building the
right ecosystem of partners and helping them in delivering the
right services and skills to seize the opportunity around SD-WAN.

Silver Peak is also expanding its service provider ecosystem of
partners which offer turnkey managed SD-WAN services. “Managed
services provide customers with an alternative to a DIY
deployment model by taking our offering and making that available
as a managed service, providing customers with choice and
deployment options on how they gain access to these advanced WAN
services,” O’Brien added.

In addition to supporting service providers in managed SD-WAN
service rollouts, Silver Peak also relies on VARs, who sell its
enterprise offerings; systems integrators (SIs); and
distributors, who bring together global logistics and support and
value-added offerings to help the all partners with value added
services. To help partners gain access to deployment skills,
Silver Peak also has created an Authorized Deployment Partner
program where partners can become competent in or gain access to
deployment skills, so we can equip partners to help customers
select the right deployment model that best meets their business
requirements.

Clear and predictable advantages

Silver Peak has made its Partner Edge
program more predictable, while making incentives and
value-added offerings easier to obtain for partners. Partners now
clearly understand what is required at the Silver, Gold and
Platinum tiers, including up-front revenue and training
objectives. This enables partners to align their SD-WAN
investments directly to a set of rewards and see how their
investments correlate to revenue growth, margins and
profitability.

“Every partner knows how much revenue they have to generate to
get to a certain level and what the corresponding rewards are for
that level,” said O’Brien. “It’s really basic channel stuff but
it’s something we were lacking so we fixed that.”

“Secondly, we allow partners to get an incentive rebate on all of
their sales that meet certain criteria. We’re going to be
aggressive on the front end for pricing, but we’re also going to
reward on the back end with additional margin incentives. That’s
important so the partner can plan and apply resources knowing
that they’re going to make some money on the deals.”

“Thirdly, we completely revamped our tools, training and
accreditation. Our goal is to make them very proficient in the
positioning and selling of an SD-WAN solution.”

A set of Silver Peak incentives rewards Gold and Platinum
partners that focus on growth initiatives in selling the Silver
Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN
edge platform. Partners realize the direct margin benefit to
their company when they shift customers away from shrinking
hardware margins toward higher-margin software-defined offerings.
Additionally, Silver Peak inside and field sales teams are
adopting a programmatic approach to pass active leads directly to
partners, expediting time to new opportunity and revenue.

Another motivating factor for Silver Peak partners is that 100
percent of the services revenue around deploying its SD-WAN
solution goes to the partner. In addition, the new Silver Peak
Authorized Deployment Partner program provides a path for
partners to become a certified post sales arm of Silver Peak that
delivers to customers complete turn-key deployment and management
services for its SD-WAN platform.

Coveted skillsets

Meanwhile, skillset requirements are changing, especially in the
deployment and integration services arena.“Partners are quickly
realizing that need to have a new set of architectural skills to
become proficient in architecting and selling an SD-WAN
solution,” O’Brien advised. “Silver Peak offers a unified SD-WAN
edge platform that brings SD-WAN, routing, security and WAN
optimization together in a single centrally managed
system.”

Deploying SD-WAN as an unified platform with all four network
functions enables Silver Peak partners to help customers to
re-architect their WAN for the cloud and depending on their
unique security requirements, seamlessly service chain
EdgeConnect to leading next generation firewalls and cloud
security services from Palo Alto, Check Point and Zscaler.

“When you look at that type of functionality, architectural
experience and technical expertise are critical for a partner,”
O’Brien added. “The second thing is that the rollout of
multi-regional complex implementations of SD-WAN really requires
our partners to have a good project management skillset to help
their customers throughout that journey.”

Silver Peak has refreshed its training materials and courses to
reflect the innovations across its EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge
platform. The training and certification programs are available
as self-pace or instructor-led and are complementary to all
partners.

Regionally, Silver Peak is building on its investments in ASEAN,
Japan and ANZ. In ASEAN, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia
and the Philippines are key markets.

“SD-WAN is ideal for Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines for
a couple of reasons,” said Dean Vaughan (pictured above,
right), vice president of sales for Asia Pacific and Japan
for Silver Peak. “MPLS costs are still very high in the region,
particularly in Malaysia. That’s driving customers towards cost
savings and they see SD-WAN as a major enabler for that.
Secondly, we’re seeing more investments from cloud providers in
each of the countries, building points of presence and their own
data centers. And that’s opening the door for enterprises to
start leveraging the cloud. That means their applications are no
longer residing in a central data center, but they are actually
hosted from multiple locations.

“The third reason is that, unlike a lot of other SD-WAN vendors,
Silver Peak unifies its traditional WAN optimization technology
together with SD-WAN. So, in a country like Indonesia, which is
so spread out across so many islands with so many endpoints, they
need SD-WAN at each endpoint, but they also realize the benefit
of our Unity Boost WAN
optimization technology, which gives them higher network and
application performance as well.”

Further, with Silver Peak being recognized as a Leader in the
Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN edge infrastructure has generated
interest among CIOs and COOs in Silver Peak with the company now
responding to more tenders and RFPs than ever before.

Steadfast support

Still, Vaughan is well aware, amidst positive sentiments, that
when there is a problem, the partner expects the vendor to be
there to support them and his key message is: “We’re here to
support you."

Indeed, Silver Peak is committed and invested in ASEAN, Hong Kong
and the broader Asian market. “We recognize that as a company
delivering global solutions, we can’t be that without a firm
understanding and a support structure in place to support our
partners and customers across the Asia Pacific and Japan region.
The company is investing in a number of resources to make sure we
do just that,” said O’Brien. “Secondly, for partners is that we
represent, the SD-WAN market that opens up opportunity for them
to disrupt a global WAN services market that represents more than
$100 billion annually.

“And because we are a pure-play solution and we deliver a unified
SD-WAN edge platform, with zero-touch provisioning, we allow them
to be really effective in positioning, selling and deploying
SD-WANs successfully.”

“Thirdly, we’re encouraging service providers to talk to us about
how our platform can serve as the foundation for their managed
SD-WAN services, and in a broader sense, how we can collectively
address the cloud-to-cloud connectivity and the application
migration challenges that customers are bringing to them.”

Conversations around the emergence of a self-driving wide area
network, the use of automation, business intent overlays, and how
Silver Peak sees WAN technologies moving over time also helps
partners provide a clear strategic vision that assures customers
can successfully shift from a conventional router-centric WAN
approach to a business-first networking model with minimal
risk.